Police tackled and restrained the teenage sister of 12-year-old Tamir Rice when she rushed to her dying brother after a Cleveland, Ohio cop fatally shot the boy in November, according to newly released video footage of the now notorious incident.

The Cleveland Police
Department shared the 30-minute recording on Wednesday night,
lending credence to claims made by the Rice family about how law
enforcement acted in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.
This comes in the midst of a wave of similar tragic
officer-involved incidents that have unfolded across the United
States in recent months.

"This has to be the cruelest thing I've ever seen,"
Akron-based attorney Walter Madison, a representative of the Rice
family, told the Northeast Ohio Media Group when he viewed the
video footage.

On November 22, 2014, the Cleveland Police Department received
reports concerning a male with a gun at an area playground, and a
cruiser, with Officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback,
arrived on the scene shortly after.

Police said Loehmann engaged when Rice reached into his
waistband, and that officers didn’t learn until after the fact
that the boy only had a non-lethal airsoft pistol. An
abbreviated, 2.5-minute video clip, taken from a nearby
surveillance camera and released by the police days after the
incident, showed previously that Loehmann, 26, fired two shots at
Rice in just as many seconds. This happened as soon as the
officer got out of his vehicle, fatally wounding the boy.

According to the new footage made available this week, roughly
one minute after Rice was shot by Officer Timothy Loehmann, the
victim’s 14-year-old sister sped to his aid but was intercepted
by another cop, forced to the ground and eventually detained in a
nearby patrol car only a few feet from her dying brother.

Cory Shafer, a reporter for the Northeast Ohio Media Group, wrote
on Wednesday that the video, released only after a lengthy debate
between the press group and city officials intent on withholding
the footage, confirm claims made last month by Samaria Rice, the
mother of the deceased.

"I noticed my son laying down on the ground and I went
charging and yelling and everything at the police because they
wouldn't let me through," she said during a December 8 press conference. "Then I seen
my daughter in the back of the police car -- the same car that
the shooter got out of. As I was trying to get through to my son,
the police told me to calm down or they would put me in the back
of a police car."

"She told me that the police tackled her and put her in
handcuffs,” she recalled hearing from her daughter. “I
didn't even know she was in handcuffs. I knew she was crying for
me, but I couldn't see her hands. This is what she told me that
she was in handcuffs in the back of the car. They also questioned
her with no adult around."

The Rice family filed a lawsuit last month against the city of
Cleveland and the two officers, and Mayor Frank Jackson said last
week that Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Department had taken the lead
in the local investigation. The second-in-command at that office
will spearhead the probe, Shafer reported, and then hand evidence
to Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty, who is tasked with
presenting the information to a grand jury responsible for
deciding whether or not any of the officers should be criminally
indicted.

Last month, US Attorney General Eric Holder traveled to Cleveland
to announce the Department of Justice had uncovered evidence of “systematic deficiencies,”
“inadequate training” and “ineffective policies”
exhibited by local law enforcement between 2010 and 2013. There
were 600 examples during this time, along with what he described
as “inadequate engagement with the community.”

“We found that CDP officers too often use unnecessary and
unreasonable force in violation of the Constitution. Supervisors
tolerate this behavior and, in some cases, endorse it,” the
department’s report concluded.

“The DOJ and the city of Cleveland have come together to set
in motion a process that will remedy these issues,” Holder
said.

Tamir Rice’s death came only two days after a grand jury in St.
Louis County decided not to indict Darren Wilson, at the time an
officer with the Ferguson, Missouri Police Department, over an
August 2014 incident in which he fatally shot Michael Brown, an
unarmed black teen.

Coupled with similar tragic events, including the death in July
of Eric Garner in Staten Island at the hands of the New York
Police Department, rallies and protests have raged across the US
in an effort to raise awareness of what demonstrators say are
unjust law enforcement policies and police tactics.